Nine Years and Going Strong

In the same week that Yahoo! announces that they are shutting down Maven, Joost announces that they are joining the video management fray. And so the wheels turn. The exits and entries into our market got me thinking about our experiences at thePlatform. As an active leader in the online video publishing space for nine years, we’ve seen a lot.

Some things have remained the same:

Our focus on this market hasn’t wavered. We’re three years into our acquisition by Comcast, we have a stronger presence than ever in the market, and we continue to invest heavily in product development.

Our founding team is largely intact and still lacing up our shoes every day to compete hard. We have as much collective experience as anyone in the industry and we’re still having a great time pushing the envelope.

Our customer base and their activity have continued to grow. We’re seeing more content, more consumption, and more monetization for our customers.

Some things have changed or evolved over the years:

We’ve seen competitors come and go, and have enjoyed duking it out with a few good ones. All of them have helped make us a better company.

Business models for offering content have shifted around: commerce, free, ad-supported, hybrid, etc. This has forced us to be nimble and flexible and has hurt some companies that bet too big in one direction or another.

Video quality has continued to improve, making online viewing more compelling and mainstream.

There are several exciting trends that we’re helping our customers to capitalize on:

Entitlements will enable more content to move online.

We’re seeing the rise of social tools as drivers of friendly recommendations and viral distribution. Harnessing communication tools like Twitter and communities like Facebook is proving to be an important component of almost any digital media strategy. We’re actively developing solutions to make it easier than ever to connect social media with premium video services.

Watching our customers innovate and create profitable businesses with online video is really rewarding. We help by providing them with really efficient tools and by focusing on total cost of ownership to make sure that they are getting effective solutions for their business models.

As operators consider the challenges and rewards of moving toward all-IP systems for video services, we’re working on the products that will help them get there.

I think these trends will shape the market over the next few years. I’m happy to say that between our scale, proven technology and an owner that shares our long-term vision, thePlatform is well positioned to play a key role in this market.